"energy" entries

I've been thinking of Fermi's Paradox since I saw the documentary film A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, with its dire predictions of the wars and disruptions that could occur on the downward slope of the Hubbert curve. While I remain an optimist about the power of human ingenuity to surmount enormous challenges, I have enough sense of history…

According to GreenerComputing.com: A public swimming pool in Zurich will soon be heated for the comfort of local residents, thanks to an innovative solution: heat generated by a data center that would otherwise be classified as waste. The new data center in Zurich is one of three projects in Europe and the Middle East that IBM has announced in recent…

Saul Griffith has published a version of his talk at ETech as a website, wattzon.org. Saul's key points: Solving global warming is an engineering problem. We know the connection between greenhouse gases and global warming, and can determine just how much carbon we're allowed to put into the atmosphere to give us the temperature we can live with. The…

Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis: How green is your web page? Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great for you and your company. But it’s better for everyone else on the planet, too. Intrigued by an article on…

Saul Griffith started the day with a sober, but ultimately hopeful, talk about energy literacy. The subtitle of the talk was "know what you can do, do what you can," and the core of his talk (we'll point to the slides when we get 'em) was the steps we need to take, individually and collectively, to be able to have…

Last May, I wrote about the City of Berkeley closing down The Shipyard. A communal workspace for artists and alternative techies, The Shipyard was organized by Jim Mason; it was built as stacks of shipping containers. After the shutdown notice came, members of The Shipyard dispersed to other locations in the East Bay. Now, after months and months of negotiations…

Over on the howtoons blog, Saul Griffith writes: I really like the way this advertisement demonstrates how the energy we use, when produced by fossil fuels, leads to Carbon Dioxide emissions. Carbon Dioxide is normally invisible which is why we have no real sense of how much is produced by using a blender or washing machine. But if it's in…

Have Italians always been so parsimonious with their electricity? We pull up to our B&B in Siracusa in the deepening dusk, and wonder if it's been abandoned. We're sure we have the correct address, but no light peeps from any window, heavy wooden doors face the street, the outdoor sign is only faintly illuminated, and the only light comes from…

As Brady mentioned last week, Biodiesel use skyrocketed at Burning Man this year by both the organization and individual participants. Groups like the Green Tortoise and the Burn Green Express even partnered with Bently Biofuels to provide on-site refueling for their vehicles and others (including mine). Most diesel-engined cars and trucks can run on biodiesel without any modifications other than…

Tim's been watching power for a while, as you may have noticed from his Radar posts and talks. We're doing our first Energy Innovation Conference in August (22-24, San Francisco) and you're invited. I've been helping Allison Randal from O'Reilly, Alec Proudfoot and Chris Uhlik from Google put together the program. You're probably asking yourself "why energy?" (at least, you…